Roosevelt shot in Milwaukee on Oct. 14, 1912

On this day in 1912, a saloonkeeper named John Schrank shot former President Theodore Roosevelt while Roosevelt, as the presidential candidate of the Progressive Party, prepared to give a campaign speech in Milwaukee, Wis.

The force of Schrank’s bullet, aimed directly at Roosevelt's heart, was slowed by a steel eyeglass case and a copy of his campaign speech stuffed in the breast pocket of his heavy coat. After being arrested, Schrank gave as his motive for the shooting his belief that "any man looking for a third term ought to be shot."

Story Continued Below

Having suffered only a flesh wound from the attack, Roosevelt went on to deliver his scheduled speech with the bullet still lodged in his body.

After speaking a few words, the one-time "Rough Rider" pulled a torn and bloodstained manuscript from his breast pocket and declared, "You see, it takes more than one bullet to kill a bull moose." (The Progressives were popularly known as the "Bull Moose Party,” which got its name after Roosevelt had earlier told reporters, "I'm as fit as a bull moose.”)

Roosevelt spoke for nearly an hour before being taken to the hospital. Doctors determined that he was not seriously wounded and that it would be more dangerous to attempt to remove the bullet than to leave it in his chest. Roosevelt carried it with him until he died in 1919.

Slowed, however, in his campaign endeavors by the wound, Roosevelt, who had served as the nation’s 26th president from 1901 to 1909, lost to Democrat Woodrow Wilson in a three-way race in November.

Roosevelt’s candidacy may have denied the incumbent Republican nominee, William Howard Taft, who took office as a Roosevelt protégé, his bid to serve a second term. Schrank was subsequently deemed insane and committed to a mental hospital, where he died in 1943.